A tale worth telling of four women scientists whose names you should know but don’t

You might have heard of Lise Meitner. A native of Austria, she was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. She also helped discover nuclear fission. Yet the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for that accomplishment went solely to her longtime collaborator, Otto Hahn.

Meitner battled misogyny and sexism at every stage of her illustrious career. But growing antisemitism and the 1933 Nazi takeover of Germany were an even higher-order problem. Although she was a convert to Lutheranism, her Jewish heritage endangered her. With the help of friends, she was able to flee in 1938 to neutral Sweden, where she was safe but scientifically isolated. “I can never discuss my experiments with anyone who understands them,” she wrote to fellow physicist Hedwig Kohn.

In “Sisters in Science,” Olivia Campbell tells the intertwined stories of Meitner and three other notable, but lesser known, women physicists from Germany: Kohn, Hertha Sponer and Hildegard Stücklen. Only Kohn was Jewish, but the Third Reich’s hostility to women academics cost the other two jobs as well.

Cover photo of “Sisters in Science”

(Park Row Books)

All three eventually made it to the United States, where they pursued their careers and continued to support one another (and Meitner too). Kohn, the last to escape, didn’t make it out of Europe until 1940. She endured two months of arduous travel through the Soviet Union and Japan and across the Pacific Ocean, barely surviving the ordeal.

Theirs is an inspiring tale, and well worth telling — all the more so because, as Campbell notes in her dedication, so many other women academics were murdered by the Nazis. “Their absence haunts this book; the rippling impact of their loss affects us all,” she writes.

But its intrinsic interest notwithstanding, “Sisters in Science” is a sometimes frustrating read. Part of the problem is its ambitious scope. Group biography is a tricky genre. Campbell has to meld four narrative arcs: parallel at times, overlapping at others, but also divergent. A more elegant stylist, or a true adept of narrative nonfiction, might have managed to integrate these stories more seamlessly. It doesn’t help that Campbell refers to her protagonists by their first names — and three of the four begin with the letter “H.”

Explaining the physics to a lay audience is another challenge, perhaps an insuperable one. Campbell attempts it only nominally. The idea of fission, the splitting of atomic nuclei and resulting production of vast amounts of energy, is more or less intelligible. But the accomplishments of the other three physicists, who worked in spectroscopy, optics and astrophysics, are harder to grasp.

The book also would have benefited from better copy editing and fact-checking. Whatever her bona fides as a science journalist, Campbell is not at home in Holocaust history. One example: Campbell locates Dachau, the Nazis’ first concentration camp, in Oranienburg, a suburb of Berlin. Dachau opened in 1933 in the town of Dachau, near Munich. Oranienburg was actually the site of another eponymous camp and then, in 1936, Sachsenhausen.

There are other errors and infelicities. Campbell continually refers to Kristallnacht, the November 1938 Nazi pogrom, as “the Kristallnacht.” A more serious lapse is her anachronistic suggestion that, in 1938, Meitner feared being deported to a “death camp.” Camps such as Dachau and Sachsenhausen were brutal, often murderous places, but in the 1930s, they mostly housed Nazi political opponents (some of them Jewish). Jews were not yet being deported from Germany, and the six death camps dedicated to their extermination — places such as Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau, all in Poland — did not become operational until the early 1940s.

It is also somewhat crude, and arguably inaccurate, to say that Kristallnacht “exposed the Nazis’ true agenda for the Jewish people: they wanted them all dead.” Despite the growing virulence of anti-Jewish persecution, that goal was not yet clear, and not yet official policy. In fact, though some were killed, most of the 30,000 or so Jewish men rounded up and taken to concentration camps during Kristallnacht were released on the condition that they emigrate.

Presumably Campbell is on firmer ground elsewhere — in noting, for instance, the difficulties that women scientists faced in Germany, including fights for pay, lab space and recognition; and in emphasizing the ways that they, and a few sympathetic male colleagues, helped one another endure, flourish and eventually escape.

When she first became Hahn’s assistant in Berlin, for example, Meitner was exiled from the main lab and stuck in a basement workshop with no nearby restroom. She ultimately rose to head the physics department at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, a post she retained even after her Nazi-era dismissal from the University of Berlin.

Some male scientists were dead set against women. Others, such as Max Planck, welcomed collaboration from only the most exceptional of their female peers. One heroic supporter of women in science was the Nobel laureate James Franck. A German Jew, he resigned his post at the University of Göttingen before he could be fired, immigrated to the United States via Denmark, and was later instrumental in aiding colleagues, including women, who remained behind.

Franck and Sponer, his onetime assistant, were especially close — both friends and scientific collaborators. After a stint at the University of Oslo, Sponer accepted a position at North Carolina’s Duke University in 1936, and began working with Edward Teller, the eventual creator of the hydrogen bomb, “on the vibrational excitation of polyatomic molecules by electron collisions.”

Only after Franck’s wife died in 1942 did his long-germinating romance with Sponer come to fruition. He remained at the University of Chicago, and she at Duke. But in 1946, they married, and in Campbell’s sympathetic telling, experienced true happiness amid the sorrows around them.

Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.